Every startup journey involves making some really hard decisions.
Yesterday our portfolio company Kik announced they are shutting down the Kik messenger and parting ways with all but nineteen of their team.
The Kik team has spent almost a decade working on the Kik messenger. Although Kik’s popularity has waned in the face of iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc, etc, it still has 10mm monthly users and almost 5mm daily users. But it has never been a profitable business in a market full of free competitors.
The decision to shut Kik and scale back to a small core developer team is all about continuing to support the Kin cryptocurrency which has over 2mm monthly people earning Kin and over 600k spending Kin across a large network of mobile apps that run the Kin SDK.
But even so, shutting down something you have worked on for almost a decade and parting ways with 90% of your team is hard.
Another thing about hard decisions is the sooner you make them the sooner you realize the benefits of making them. Postponing them is the worst thing you can do.
Kik is not the only company in our portfolio and is certainly not the only company out there in startup land facing very hard decisions right now. I see a lot of this thing in my business and it doesn’t get easier.
What we must do is support the teams making these decisions and getting to the other side of them.
I will end this with a quote that the founder of one of our portfolio companies sent me this week. I think it sums it up nicely.
My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I am attacking.
Field Marshall Foch in the Battle of the Marne
